This is the first publication dedicated to the extraordinary series of paintings of London that André Derain produced at the height of his avant-garde notoriety, having been newly branded a Fauve or 'wild beast' in Paris for his uncompromising use of pure colour. Building on his rising artistic fame, Derain's dealer Ambroise Vollard sent him to London in 1906 to produce works that would rival Claude Monet's recently exhibited views of the city. The result was a series of canvases that confronted the traditions of Impressionism and constructed a new artistic language to express an unprecedented vision of the capital, seen not as fogshrouded and gloomy but bathed in piercingly bright sunshine and radiating wild colours. New research and the recent discovery of Derain's two London sketchbooks has completely rivised our understanding of these paintings. It allows us to appreciate fully the impact of the young artist's three visits to the city between 1906 and 1907, considering especially the importance of his studies in the ethnographic galleries of the British Museum and his encounters with the foreign customs of London itself. Andrè Derain: The London Paintings presents this new work and reproduced all 29 canvases in full colour together with pages from the sketchbooks for the first time.
